Rex Murphy: An institution that accepts North Korea and Iran has nothing over us

Oh, my. It’s the long-form census gone international — another dreadfully inconsequential non-event turning into an issue. Canada didn’t win election for a temporary two-year term on the UN’s Security Council. This is the greatest tragedy since Susan Boyle caved in and got a makeover.

Back home some very strange Tory minds are trying to place the blame for our missing that pinnacle on opposition leader Michael Ignatieff. The charge is risible and pathetic to boot. If Michael Ignatieff has the power to work his dominion over the combined nations of the world — to bend China, the Arab bloc, Latin America and Africa to his imperious will — why oh why he is wasting his time running around the parochial sandbox with Stephen Harper in Ottawa?

Others are desperately trying to spin the loss on “the world” or the “international community,” signaling their distress and disapproval of the “policies of the Harper government” — a position even more pathetic than trying to hang the blame on Michael Ignatieff. What is this “world” or “international community” of which they speak with such confidence, and when did it report in on the Harper agenda?

The international community is a journalistic phantom, analogous to the famous “Arab street.” Both are really merely puppet fictions, through which activists or propagandists mouth the convenient line of the day. In the case of Canada’s loss of the two-year term, the line goes that “our stand” on Kyoto, or our sturdy defence of Israel in recent times, earned our boy-scout country the opprobrium of the more “respectable” international community. Canada (read Harper) has outraged the fine-tuned conscience of the right-thinking world community, and was thereby “punished” by not getting the UN seat. This, of course, is pure dog wipe of the highest order.

For the actual, mechanical reason of why Canada lost, go no further than David Frum’s column in this very paper a few days ago (“Stuffing the UN’s ballot box,” Oct. 14.). It underplays only one element I think, the Obama’s administration’s indifference toward our effort. But otherwise, Frum explains the tactical error of the Canadian effort with lucidity and in detail. And it has nothing to do moral shocks delivered by the dark minds and cunning ministers of the Harper administration to some putative and morally pristine international community. Come to think of it, how do you offend an international community that tolerates, say, North Korea and Darfur?

The real question here is why do so many people seem to care? Actually really care? What, after all, is a vote at the UN? It is at best a morally weightless gesture. More frequently it is a transaction freighted with duplicity and hidden design, purchased or traded for ends ulterior to its purpose. It is in other cases the stooge response of a debtor country to its creditors. And in yet others, it is a counter or an expression of unbending prejudice or ideological hostility.

No self-respecting country will feel “embarrassment” from “losing” such a vote. You can only feel real embarrassment if you’ve been declined or rebuked by someone or some institution you respect. Not getting Hugo Chavez’s support? Not winning over China, which has a Nobel Peace Prize winner in its gulag? Not winning over Iran, as it threatens the monstrous stoning, which it may commute to a “merciful” hanging, of a woman for having sex? Not winning over Libya, Sudan or Saudi Arabia? How is any of that an embarrassment?

There’s something of what the Australians used to call the “cultural cringe” in some Canadians’ attitudes toward the way the so called world community views us. It’s as if there is a need for an occasional pat on the head from the big, outside world to confirm our moral stature, or secure our sense of complacency as a decent, right-acting country. We really do seek the “gold star” of world opinion with an avidity that speaks a lack of mature self-confidence. Mature nations have the confidence of their own ideas, their own positions and their own policies. They do not crave external confirmation.

And they certainly do not put any store on the machinations of that degraded body, the United Nations, as an institution that has the slightest ability to lessen our honest regard for ourselves, or the honest regard of other nations of the world, who over the years, have truly come to know us. From Holland to Haiti, we have nothing to be ashamed of.

National Post

Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.